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Saturday, March 12, 2011

The premise, as presented by John Giordano: It is discovered that life can be supported on a pristine planet JUST LIKE THE EARTH located in a distant galaxy. The only difference is that there aren't any humans on the planet. The most evolved animals are apes and monkeys. All the natural resources are the same as Earth. Technology exists to get four people to the planet on a scouting mission. They will stay for one year, planning for the arrival of settlers from Earth.

1

Should our settlement on Gaia 2 be an extension of the known, no different from Gaia 1 than New York is from Timbuktu? Should we send an ambassador from Burger King, or a lawyer from the International Monetary Fund, or an ideologue from Harkin Energy to privatize the water supply? Should a lottery be held among the five large media conglomerates to see who should control the wavebands of interplanetary news? Should we transport our habits, both good and bad, in order to create an environment familiar to the touch, or should the voyage be regarded as a new beginning, in which all certainties are put aside?

The questions we ask will condition the answers that become available. We worship practicality, but in many ways our actions are not practical at all. We do not live in our bodies. Desire is abstract. Terror is no longer an emotion; it is the remote-controlled hand of the oligarch, bread for the circus, an economic windfall, or an art movement searching for the door to a museum.

Our accumulation of fetishistic objects has perhaps become a form of addiction unto death. Is technology a blessing or a curse? There is no time to judge. Once set in motion, it sweeps all before it like a juggernaut. Blocked memory pushes what the strange attractor pulls. It is we who were left as a sacrifice to the recombinant simulacrum. We are the real victims of an artificial war, which has existed from a time before necessity shrunk the atom. Should our settlers be experts, and if so, how do we insure their freedom from the influence of corrupt agendas?
We should determine, first, how many objects are really needed to sustain the life of a community. Perhaps far fewer than we think. Is it too fantastic to suggest that our settlers bring next to nothing with them? They will see with fresh eyes. They will feel with open hearts. Let them bring a few tools and instruments, the clothes on their backs, the energy around them. Let them act on what they know. The gifts they share should produce a more than adequate abundance.

Is it even possible to prepare for such a voyage? Let us entertain the possibility that the present Earth is not our home. That our race the remnant of a similar adventure.

The plan will succeed through an act of hallucinated self-destruction. Species will devolve, allowing the new gods to play. Communication with Gaia 1 will be suddenly cut off. The omnidirectional eye will blink, and then stay shut. The spider-pod's legs will be frozen by arthritis. Objects will rust, and will soon be seen as ancestral parts of the environment. Ocean probes will revolt against instructions. Weather balloons will refuse to inflate. An extinct but oddly functional life form, their one computer will be exhibited at the Museum of Natural History.

2

Scouts could be chosen to illustrate each of Jung’s four cardinal functions. We could call them Intellect, Emotion, Sensation and Intuition. By such verbal actions the gods once generated history. But we have been there, and done that. Eyes wide as plates refocus on the red dawn of omnipotence.

Our allegiance is to a sun that has long since disappeared. We are exiles, with no place to go. We are the citizens of a city with no physical location.

Casting shadows from an aviary that was swallowed by the deluge, our technological genius has again come home to roost. We should learn from the skeletons that the gods keep locked in their closets. These were the brave. A personality type is as stable as the ocean that it walks on. As the story requires, we must put our total hope for transformation in the actors, who are pure, since they do not yet exist. Our four scouts are the vanguard of a perpetual revolution.

Soma – flow for Indra; hallucinatory energies will soon harden into facts. Each dogma will be overthrown.

No action now produces an equal and opposite reaction. The law, as now written, states that every action is to give birth to a metaphor; in its turn, this should catalyze some burst of occult action at a distance.

For 26,000 years, we have labored to build out of dreams the great labyrinth of the Ego. No self is singular. Each choice leads to an unexpected end. The hand of antimatter points to the icon of predestination. The gods too must be moved, as our violence has just informed them. There are none who do not rise or fall.

It is the principle of uncertainty that drives the data around every electrified U-turn of the microchip. Again, the labyrinth flies, before a glitch erases every password in the network.

(Illustration: Brian George, Bird Arising Out of Snake Arising Out of Vessel, 1989)

Sections 3-11 of "Four Scouts to the New World" will be posted over the next week and a half.

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Mission

Modern Mythology is the group blog of Mythos Media, a transmedia production group. An open nexus for creation, discussion and analysis, on the part of people who are actively engaged in modern myths. Much of what you'll find here are works-in-progress, like the starts and stops of an ongoing conversation.

Present and past contributors have been engaged in a wide range of work outside of this project: we are film-makers, published authors, professors, we are doing advanced linguistic analysis for behavioral software, we work for ad agencies, play in bands. There are no borders anymore.